Ivor Blumenthal (Services SETA CEO) wrote a scathing response to this article in the Business Day -Skills training funds missing the target. Blumenthal argues that the Labour and Finance departments did not discuss the removal of the 1% skills development levy (SDL) for companies whose annual payroll was less the R500k, I have heard that SARS will not accept the payment even if it is voluntary. In fact he suggests that there is a huge rift between the two departments.
And I quote. "Now, one year after the exemption, this chicken is home roosting. SMEs are now far worse off than they were when they were paying levies. No training and development of any meaningful consequence is occurring among this 600000-strong group of registered businesses, and worse, these SMEs have resorted to activities engaged in during the days of industry training boards, where they wait for medium-size and large businesses to train staff, then simply poach the good ones."
The Labour Minister, Membathisi Mdladlana, has woken up to this fact and he's looking for cash to solve this problem. Mdladlana does not consider the National Skills Fund as an option to fund SMMEs (the NSF gets approximately R1billion of the total R5billion collected annually from the SDL; it uses that money towards skills programmes that target the poor and unemployed). And he's a little shy on what the solution is.
We were all a little confused as to why the QSE skills development scorecard provided 5 points for making an application to the NSF. It seems clearer now that this requirement is some sort of a typo. They might be referring to a voluntary SDL payment, I reckon this is a better solution.
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